Mobile app lets you ‘Tweet-A-Beer’

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Mobile app lets you ‘Tweet-A-Beer’

(CNN) — Looking to sell the public on your plan to combine Twitter with beer drinking? Well, there are worse places to push the idea than South by Southwest Interactive, the annual gathering known as “spring break for geeks.” (Or for “tech hipsters.” The line is getting blurrier and blurrier these days.)

The Tweet-A-Beer mobile app is rolling out this week at SXSW, the Austin, Texas, festival that has helped launch such social-networking staples as Foursquare and Twitter.

Tweet-A-Beer, from Portland’s tenfour, combines your Twitter and PayPal accounts so you can beer a buddy on the Internet “to ensure that distance, agoraphobia and gang rivalries no longer prevent you from sharing a pint.”

Tweet-A-Beer uses Chirpify, a Twitter payment app. Once signed up, a user enters the screen name of another Twitter user and the app credits $5 to their PayPal account.

You can also enter a message — the app suggests a reason for the sudsy gift or maybe a suggested meeting place and time — and it will appear in a tweet.

The recipient clicks “Claim Beer Money” and — voila — their PayPal account is $5 to the good.

OK, so, technically, we suppose you could use those five bucks at iTunes or Amazon, for online gambling of dubious legality or, well, most anything. But there must be some bad karma associated with not buying an e-beer when a buddy has taken the time to tweet it your way.

“Seriously, we recommend using it for beer,” reads the app’s website. “Because … it’s beer.”

Chirpify takes a 10-cent fee from the recipient’s account to cover the transaction. Tenfour and PR-firm partner Waggener Edstrom say they make no money on the beerfest.